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[Grinly]

On pondering the system to make dwarven mothers drop their infants so that I can pit them for child care immediately after birth I realized that someone needs access to infants to feed and water them if you want them to live, and the wiki lists a bug that makes the parents search for them until they die of thirst. Using the "Babies drop when the mother enters a minecart" bug is right out. (Unless someone else can think of a workaround.)

There is the potential for a were curse eliminating the problem of "too many children beaten to death by turkeys" and the dwarven dehydration problem caused by lost children - but the giant were badger was the wrong way to go. It is too much !Fun! for a child to handle. We need a female dwarf infected with a form of Werecurse that is so harmless they can beat on and bite an infant for an entire full moon and usually leave it alive, but not so pathetic an infant can kill them. We also need a secondary method to spread this to other dwarves, to facilitate mass production of little Dwarven were-babies for our experiments.

There are both down and up sides to this approach. The violent deranged sociopath that emerges from the chamber after it matures will be pathetically weak during the full moon, but will also heal any status ailments or lost limbs during its time of the month and its children will be easily infected and turkey pitted for training. This method has the added bonus of really concentrated training every full moon as the were child viciously beats the turkeys as hard as it possibly can.

I'm working on building some chambers and I will post back when I manage to capture the right sort of were. Is there any sort of weak beast that only uses a bite attack I should watch out for? Hopefully I get more than one kind so I can compare! For !Science!!

[Boozebeard]

Edit: Nevermind. Resolved by myself.

[Die Nacht]

So.....an Unsullied camp?

[Hanslanda]

Wait, minecarts are now being tested for Childcare? Must read this.
Nevermind. Come on guys, are we truly utilizing our resources if we can't find a way to use minecarts to train supersoldier children, if we admit defeat in attempting to weaponize husks?

[Viking]

Thralls are living creatures, minus everything that makes them a creature.  They are alive, they are not undead, they are truly living creatures, except all the things that distinguish a creature from a corpse, they lack.  They feel no pain, they do not breathe, nor bleed, nor tire, nor thirst, nor hunger, feel no pain or sorry, no joy and take no pleasure even in such things as mist.  They suffer no order and no chaos.  They are, truly, neither alive nor dear, nor really undead.  A Husk is, at its core, a void.  A sin against god in the purest form.  Not simply a blight like a dwarven fort will be named "a sin against nature" but in every sense of the word the Husk is a sin, something which defies nature and embodies everything that should never be.

A Husk will never breath, eat, rest, or suffer fear.  They make an ultimate killing force which simply cannot be stopped.
A Husk ignored all orders, they will not don armor nor remove it, and cannot be controlled except by extremely physical means of walls and locked doors.
A Husk is NOT undead.  It is not a zombie.  It still counts as a living creature, and as such will eventually age and die - perhaps the only true way to defeat a Husk is simply to wall them off behind the bowels of the mountain and try your best to forget that they sit there staring at the wall and craving your death.  Never stopping, never tiring, never becoming distracted, the Husk has one, single, universally persistent thought - to kill that which lives and remove life from the world.  Even as they sit sealed behind the walls, they only linger there.  Only a layer of piled rubble and their forgotten ability to remove constructions keeps you safe as they spend decades, centuries, screaming thoughts through their (possibly torn) brains of all the ways in which they would end your life.

A Husk is not something to weaponize.  Not yet.  Nothing short of bringing the mountain down atop their heads will stop a Husk.  They need no lungs, no limbs, they don't even need a brain.  Reduced to a bleeding, fractured torso they will crawl forward, possessed of otherworldly hatred and fueled by the purest of rage, these beings of raw terror will gladly and effortlessly bring the largest of dwarven mountainhomes to a smear of dust in the time that it takes them to crawl from one end of the entrance to the lower part of the forges.

Perhaps one day we'll be able to utilize them.  They are something of raw power, and we are not ready for that quite yet.  Dwarves who harness the power of magma and upheave heaven and earth itself falter at the strength and single-minded purpose of the Husk.  We are not ready.  Dare I say it but... we are not depraved enough, not ingenious enough, not brave enough to rally the Husk.

This being of unadulterated terror remains the only thing that the craziest of dwarves will avoid.

Wow, I commend you for writing that, Girlinhat.

[Grinly]

Wait, minecarts are now being tested for Childcare? Must read this.
Nevermind. Come on guys, are we truly utilizing our resources if we can't find a way to use minecarts to train supersoldier children, if we admit defeat in attempting to weaponize husks?

Ooo, I've got it! All dorfs are routed to a minecart system for daily travel, surrounded by pits in such a way that wandering infants dropped by their parents eventually fall in. Once in the pit baby dorfs are routed to a fancy mist filled room with a dorf chained in the middle in such a way that he can reach every square, a well, and a quantum stockpile. He will feed and water them until the full moon.

Then the dorf will become a fearsome were turtle (or another lower teir were that uses a bite attack) and chow down on baby dorfs until the moon goes down. The survivors will be lever dumped and channeled into their training pens.

The first group of parents would die of dehydration looking for their infant, of course, but it's an acceptable sacrifice for !Science!.

Do were dwarves die from lack of sleep? We could toss a single vermin husk in with the infants instead of having a breeding box if the conversion would make them tough enough to survive constant combat untill they matured. No sleep. No food. No water. We can mist off the insanity in our pleasure dome.

[darkrider2]

I'm afraid I have to agree with girlinhat, thralls cannot be weaponized, I cried manly tears when I realized how right she was...

[NRDL]

Wow, Girlinhat, that makes me thing of Doomsday from DC.  Utterly unstoppable ( can't they be bisected, though? ) and almost completely uncontrollable. 

[Flying Fortress]

Great post Girlinhat, that could become a challenge to weaponize them as fast as possible though lol.
Worldgen has been unkind to me and has yet to give me a beautiful evil area with husk making clouds of doom (tried countless embarks and never get a cloud )  But reading in the forum and in the wiki I came up with a possible idea.  If they could be baited with a creature (and since they hate all life they should path to it) you could get them inside a bridged up holding cell right?  Then just release them when you want them to kill everything outside that isn't undead (<-- major hangup, they only attack living things right?) and re-bait them back inside the holding chamber when they're done.  I would like to do !!science!! on this to find out if it would even work/what a good setup would be, so if anyone has a save with the right cloud types I would love to have it. /small derail question

[Hanslanda]

[Ivir_Baggins]

What's the difference between a husk and a thrall?

[darkrider2]

What's the difference between a husk and a thrall?

I think they are the same.

[Hanslanda]

Yeah, it just depends on what kind of cloud/mist/ash they got huskified by. Different names for the same thing pretty much.

[darkrider2]

LIVE AMMO SHOTGUN:
Method has been verified with fort mode testing.

1. Make a minecart shotgun (where the cart rams a wall at high speed and the contents are ejected over the wall), but add a second stage (the cart's contents also hit a wall and eject their contents over it).

2. Load a cage containing a creature (animal, goblin, dwarf prisoner, etc.) into the minecart. A single cage holding many animals is best.

3. Fire.

4. Watch as the carts shotgun the cages, and the cages then shotgun the creatures (yes, in a conical pattern) in a parabolic path. The creatures suffer no injury until they land, unlike minecart riders, probably because of cage stasis.

Potential uses:
-Shoot goblin POWs at goblin sieges.
-Shoot zombies (necromancer, not evil region) at goblin sieges.
-Launch impressive swarms of war animals.
-Safely (well, for your dwarves) pit creatures in cages without having to open the cages or link them to levers.
-misc stunts and humor.

This is from over on the "how does minecart" thread.

I believe if we use this properly, it may actually be possible to weaponize caged husks. Just replace the goblins from above with caged husks. Proper testing SCIENCE will need to be used to determine just how far it shoots things in its secondary stage, as opposed to its first stage. Make sure that the invaders are in a place where they will not be able to enter the fort afterwards, otherwise you will have ALOT of husks running around. And half of them will be armed.

A husk with a lightsabre whip is probably the most horrid thing I could ever imagine.

Also, you can retrieve the cages later to trap more husks... ammo that isn't in the invader pit already.

[Hanslanda]

You sir, are brilliant.